Ryan Richard Rodrigues/UnsplashFor many centuries, the writings of Plutarch of Chaeronia (c.46-119CE) were at the heart of elite humanistic education in the West. We can see the influence of his Lives of Eminent Greeks and Romans and the philosophical essays in his work Moralia in early modern authors from Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon to William Shakespeare.Many of Plutarch’s essays also have a practical focus that can seem very timely in our social media age. He writes about how to cool the desire to gossip and pry into other people’s lives and how not to be taken in by salacious stories. He gives advice about how to avoid being triggered by others’ provocations and how to benefit from disagreement. He advises on how to speak about ourselves without boasting or self-advertisement, how to tell friends from conmen (or flatterers) trying to sell us something, and how to pay attention so our minds are not overloaded and scattered.It almost seems as if Plutarch was peering into the 21st century and responding to the mental health challenges our commercialised social media is producing at scale. The reality, as journalist Max Fisher outlines in his book The Chaos Machine, is that social media companies have identified the same psychological vulnerabilities Plutarch hoped to help readers to correct, recognising them as effective ways to “maximise user engagement”.Change begins with seeing the problemsPlutarch belongs to the ancient Greco-Roman culture in which philosophy was not conceived solely as a theoretical pursuit, but was linked to the pursuit of happiness. In this tradition, which long predates the advent of modern psychology, philosophers could take on the role of therapists, proffering advice on life’s challenges.Plutarch’s practical ethics in the Moralia propose two ways to help people to live happier, more serene lives. The first is to highlight the bad consequences of cultivating bad habits as a way of invoking shame and a desire to change. People who are constantly comparing their lives with others, for instance, are likely to suffer from envy and dissatisfaction with themselves: there are some who cannot bear to face their own lives, regarding these as a most unlovely spectacle […] but their souls, being full of all manner of vices, shuddering and frightened at what is within, leap outwards and prowl about other people’s concerns and there latch onto and fatten their own malice.Even without algorithmic assistance, the gossip who pries into others’ supposed secrets is likely to be taken in by the most sensational, exaggerated speculations about what others are doing behind closed doors:For as wheat shut up in a jar is found to have increased in quantity, but to have deteriorated in quality, so when a story finds its way to a gossip, it generates a large addition of falsehood and thereby destroys its credit.The habit of dwelling on causes of resentment, as algorithmic social media can promote today, produces “an evil disposition of soul, which people call irascibility”. A daily diet of outrage make a person “become sore and vexed at trifles and querulous at everyday occurrences, like iron thin and beaten out too finely”.Philosophy as therapyPlutarch’s second suggestion is prescribing regimens of what we would call cognitive-behavioural exercises. These regimens start small and aim to build up new, beneficent habits in place of the old. Busybodies who want to know about things that don’t concern them, for instance, should first practice things like not reading every piece of graffiti on public walls they pass (the Roman world had plenty of such graffiti, as our inner cities do). It may seem that no harm will come from reading these, but it does harm you by imperceptibly instilling the practice of searching out matters which do not concern you. Then they should practice not looking in at every door they pass on the street. They should then practice not opening every letter they receive straight away. Gradually, through such small steps, they will build a new habit, in doing so winning attention back to their own affairs. Today, we can adapt Plutarch’s advice by turning off the alerts on our phones and computers. We can pause before we respond straight away. We can then set times to do emails or check on our apps. And we can practice reading carefully and breathing deeply before hitting “reply”, let alone “reply all”.It won’t happen overnight. But concerted repetition can gradually allow a person to regain control over how they engage and when, with online content and “socials”, rather than the tail wagging the dog.Unhappiness 2.0Like the ancient Stoics and Epicureans, Plutarch argued the happiest life is one of inner serenity and cheerfulness towards others. The happy person prioritises what they really value and savours what they have, rather than being pulled in a hundred different directions and wracked by FOMO (fear of missing out).The chief cause of unhappiness is excessive self-love. This, writes Plutarch, “makes men eager to be first and to be victorious in everything and insatiably desirous of engaging in everything”. It makes people want to be “rich, learned, strong, […] and friends of kings and magistrates of cities.” Today, it drives people to compete to win thousands of “followers” they’ll never meet and compare themselves endlessly with others’ artfully curated online profiles.Advertisements are dissatisfaction machines, from a Plutarchean perspective: they fill us with desires for things we do not always need and which cannot lastingly satisfy us. He observes that “we do not manage our impulses, as sailors do their sails, to correspond to our capacity; in our expectations we aim at things too great”. Plutarch – Léonard Gaultier. National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY Happy people focus on what they can control. They compare themselves only with people who are worse off, to remind themselves to be grateful for what they have. Social media prompts us constantly to compare ourselves with others who present unrealistic, glamorous images of their lives. Quantified metrics of likes, shares, followers, views and citations are there to fill people with envy. These metrics prompt users to engage more, making themselves ever more dependent on others’ approval: “despite all this, we habitually live, out of stupidity, with our attention on others rather than ourselves.”Plutarch’s counsel for us today would not be to turn our devices off. This is not socially possible for most people, given the changed nature of work and leisure. Yet recent legal findings in the US, as well as growing research on the effects of social media use, especially on young people, underscore that algorithm-driven social media does not promote, and can negatively effect, individual wellbeing. It is also has a divisive effect on liberal democracies, stoking mutual suspicion and hatreds.Plutarch’s philosophical therapies for the sources of our unease which have been stoked by our interconnected, commercialised world all turn upon knowing ourselves. Notably, they recognise the ways our natural egotism can be played to by flatterers – or, today, by algorithms that “feed” our “likes” and our outrage. Becoming conscious of the ways platforms (algorithmic flatterers), are designed to foster social media addiction and play to our desires and fears, allows us to become more deliberate about how we use our devices and better manage the information that increasingly floods us all.Matthew Sharpe in the past has received funding from the Australian Research Council as a chief investigator on a project on reinventing philosophy as a way of life, and as an investigator in a Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia grant on Mapping philosophy as a way of life.